turbo-django VS fastapi

Indicative of how marvelously stable Django is that none of these roadmap items have to do with the software.

I came back to the old workhorse for some experimentation recently and was delighted, delighted (!), I tell you, at how familiar, comfortable, and productive it was.

Started exploring a Turbolinks/Turboframes implementation (https://github.com/hotwire-django/turbo-django) that Just Worked. Amusingly, mid-hack, the repo owner marked it as unmaintained.

But it works! Nothing needs doing! Another victim of the cult of constant improvement.

Yes Turbo is created by the team behind Ruby on Rails and it's an evolution of Turbolinks with bunch of other functionality added. But Turbo can be adapted to other languages and backend frameworks (and already has!). This Turbo thing is not Rails specific.

If you would like to try something different, there is this new thing called hotwired: https://github.com/hotwire-django/turbo-django Basically, it's about generating HTML on the backend and pushing it to the frontend. thru WebSockets. It's not production-ready yet (for Django at least) so it's more like a fun fact for now.

He is probably most well know for creating FastAPI that I taught to some of my clients and Typer that I've never used.

It has been an interesting exercise developing this wrapper component. The fact that it seamlessly integrates with the FastAPI framework is just a bonus for me; I didn't plan for it since I hadn't learned FastAPI at the time. I hope you find this post useful. Thank you for reading, and stay safe as always.

FastAPI is a modern, high-performance web framework for building APIs with Python, based on standard Python type hints.

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to use Burr, an open source framework (disclosure: I helped create it), using simple OpenAI client calls to GPT4, and FastAPI to create a custom email assistant agent. We’ll describe the challenge one faces and then how you can solve for them. For the application frontend we provide a reference implementation but won’t dive into details for it.

That’s when I found FastAPI.

FastAPI & Uvicorn

Discussion at FastAPI GitHub: https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/2696

An API application framework (such as FastAPI)

It’s been my experience that async Python frameworks tend to turn IO bound problems into CPU bound problems with a high enough request rate, because due to their nature they act as unbounded queues.

This ends up made worse if you’re using sync routes.

If you’re constrained on a resource such as a database connection pool, your framework will continue to pull http requests off the wire that a sane client will cancel and retry due to timeouts because it takes too long to get a connection out of the pool. Since there isn’t a straightforward way to cancel the execution of a route handler in every Python http framework I’ve seen exhibit this problem, the problem quickly snowballs.

This is an issue with fastapi, too- https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/5759

Fast API.